'We're Not Going to Let Our Campaign Be Dictated by Fact-Checkers'

By James Bennet

What happens if the press takes a stand on the truth -- and no one cares?

Reuters

Critics have for many years inveighed against "false
equivalence" or "false balance" in the mainstream press. This long crusade has
finally achieved its grail, or at least a version of it: In this campaign season, political
reporters have been shucking the old he-said-she-said formulation and directly declaring that certain claims are false. This new approach was signaled on Sunday, when, as James Fallows has noted, The New York
Times, in a front-page story, flatly stated that a Romney ad was "falsely charging that Mr. Obama has 'quietly announced' plans to eliminate work and job training
requirements for welfare beneficiaries."

But what if it turns out that when the press calls a lie a lie, nobody cares?

Here in Tampa, the new assertiveness is getting its first test on a big stage, and so far the
results are not encouraging. As Ben Smith of BuzzFeed haspointed out, the Romney
campaign is simply swatting aside the media's objections to its welfare ad: "We're not
going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers," said Neil Newhouse, a
Romney pollster.

Watch
this exchange, from a panel here this morning. On one side is my
colleague Ron Fournier, the editor-in-chief of National Journal, together with
John Dickerson of CBS and Slate; on the other, Ron Kaufman of the Romney
campaign. Both journalists call the ad
false; Kaufman rejects their view -- both of the details of the ad, and of its
political thrust, that it is, as Fournier argues, "playing the race card." The
result is a stalemate -- or, actually, a kind of mind-blowing media-political meta-vortex
that might be better fodder for students of epistemology or semiotics, and certainly
of American Studies, than for journalists, though they should probably watch it, too.

The relevant section runs from about 26:30 to about 35:30 in the video here, with a slight digression in the middle to a different issue, energy. (The Fora player will only embed a short clip from the video, not including the passage cited here.)

From a heated argument over the racial content of the ad (Fournier: "You know an ad like that touches a racial button." Kaufman: "No it doesn't. I don't agree with you at all.") the conversation pivots pack to the press's role as fact-checker when the audience begins asking the questions - and chooses to pose them to Dickerson and Fournier. Finally, Mickey Kaus of The Daily Caller, a longtime student of welfare reform, takes the mike to (sort of) defend the Romney ad.

"The
press is all full of itself about how they're going to declare that it's false," Kaus says, "but it's really a lot less false than you think it is."

Dickerson
replies that that is merely Kaus's interpretation, and then Fournier -- a guy who,
if you'll forgive my pomposity, has pretty much devoted his
adult life to the pursuit of truth -- has a bit of a Howard Beale moment:

With
all due respect, to say 'It's a lot less wrong that you think it is' is a lot
like saying, 'She's a lot less pregnant than you think she is.' Wrong is wrong,
and the ad is distorted. But to John's point, both sides are making up lies,
both sides are distorting .... Both sides are demeaning the process, both sides
are making the public mad as hell about the process -- including the media
institution .... That's why we all have to take a good look at how we're conducting
ourselves.

The
bottom line, of course, is that the ad is continuing to run. It is continuing
to run because the Romney campaign's polling shows it to be effective. And
therefore, kind of by definition, the press pushback is not having much effect -- at least not so far, and at least not in the battlegrounds where the ad is playing.

Instead
of being able to stand above the fray as some sort of neutral arbiter of the
truth, the press may be finding that it is winding up on one side of a new kind of he-said-she-said argument.